Capture Coordinates or Plugin Architecture

[jparrish (John Parrish)]

I have been looking into using my CNC to perform CMM (Coordinate Measurement Machine) functions, so that I can plot blue prints / technical drawings and easily capture things like anchor points for segments, knots for splines, etc.

My thought is using the jog feature I will be able to write them down and then reference them in my design software, but I was thinking it would be really nice if there was a plugin architecture for carbide motion, that would allow end users to write utils for the community or themselves.

Any thoughts been had about a plugin architecture?

Maybe a plugin could register input output streams, and be able to write messages to motion to dispatch to the machine, or to be able to monitor the coords. If there was a simple way to add UI for a plugin, you could build tools like a plot capture utility.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

See:

Duplicating physical items (story of 2020 Christmas break)

In Digitally Map a Surface in 3D [CNC Shark Duplicator] @JVarn was wondering (paraphrased) if a shapeoko could do the equivalent of something called “shark duplicator”, basically do a 3D scan and then a carve out of an object, and I couldn’t resist trying. Below is a short story with pictures on how this went. It all started with one of these: Which will act similar to the bitzero and bitsetter, and if you plan to buy one yourself, make sure you buy a “normally open” one that closes to gr…

I suspect if you want to interact programmatically you will need to use a 3rd party communication/control program (though I’d love to be wrong)

The Grbl folks have a page on options:

Using Grbl

[jparrish (John Parrish)]

Thanks… I have a windows machine setup with a touch screen, so I’ll have to look at the GUI packages for grbl that run on windows. Looks like some good prospects there. Does grbl work “out of the box” with a shapeoko … or are there configs etc. for each model? Just curious what the difficulty of using a complete replacement for motion is.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

Grbl just works.

I used to switch back and forth betwixt bCNC, Universal G-code Sender, and Carbide Motion.

[jparrish (John Parrish)]

I’ll have to look at how grbl connects … I’m guessing it’s a command line interface unless you use one of the GUI wrappers but that rabbit one looks pretty good

[jparrish (John Parrish)]

I just found this project… GitHub - terjeio/ioSender: A GCode Sender for Grbl and grblHAL written in C# (Windows only).

It’s written in C# which is the language I develop in… the UI looks really good too. Thought I’d share this since I am probably going to look into using this… the UI is based on windows forms … I wonder if the project would be interested in a port to MAUI which would open it up to run on any device.